Fri 28 Sep 2007
Wars, Languages and Budgets.
Posted by jangari under Indigenous, Linguistics, Politics
[3] Comments
I heard on Lateline last night that the US military is asking Congress to approve a further US$190 billion to fund its “projects” in Iraq and Afghanistan, much to the dismay of Congress:
ROBERT BYRD, DEMOCRAT SENATOR: If the Congress were to approve the President’s revised budget request, the total funding for the war in Iraq will exceed $600 billion, 600 billion, billion, billion dollars!
Meanwhile, something I had heard years ago was confirmed in a talk by Michael Walsh on Wednesday. At 100,000 pounds per year, for three years per language, it would cost some 900 million pounds (or AU$2.137 billion) to do some pretty solid documentation work on the 3000 languages predicted to lose all their speakers¹ by the end of the century. In Michael’s words, that’s equivalent to a couple of days’ oil revenue, in an average year. “Where else would you get such value for money?”²
I’m just sayin’, is all.
~
¹We don’t like using the term ‘die’.
²Based on: Crystal, D. (2004). The Language Revolution. Cambridge: Polity Press.
September 28th, 2007 at 6:14 pm
Even if the 100,000 pounds per year per language were correct, your maths is a bit off. The total 300,000 x 3,000 = 900,000,000 pounds not 900,000!
I seriously doubt that one can do good reliable documentation of languages in 3 years – perhaps some basic data collection and analysis but for serious work let’s think in terms of 5-7 years, at least.
I suggest the major problem is, who is going to do all this documentation? We simply don’t have enough well trained people to undertake the task.
September 28th, 2007 at 8:48 pm
I am horrified and ashamed at where my government chooses to spend our money.
September 29th, 2007 at 12:36 pm
Ha, you’re right Peter. I accidentally left off three zeroes, which I’ll fix up. But at least the AU$2.137 billion was right. I take your second point, but three years of research into many languages that would otherwise get only very paltry research, if any, would put a real dent in the current endangerment situation.
And yes, true, there aren’t enough trained linguists to do all this, but there are plenty of linguists without adequate funding to do their research. Besides, a massive injection of funds might attract more linguists back to doing documentation, or even attract other people to the field altogether.
MrsChili, you’re not alone in that. Most of our governments spend the taxpayers’ money in questionable ways.